Teaching Students to Follow an Idea

I teach first-year academic writing courses in the University of Georgia English Department. Lately, I have been using JSTOR to help my students see research differently through an activity I call “Biography of an Idea.” Students begin with one scholarly article in JSTOR, usually from their discipline, and choose an idea, question, concept, argument, or even a citation that interests them. They then follow that idea backward and forward through scholarship: tracing where it came from, how other scholars have changed or challenged it, and what happens to it as it moves from one source to another. The goal is not simply to find more sources, but to experience research as an act of following knowledge. In this way, their paper becomes an intellectual conversation.

I developed this activity because students often perceive research writing as a series of requirements: finding scholarly sources, writing an annotated bibliography, citing sources, and producing a literature review. These requirements are useful, but they can also make scholarship seem like a collection of finished objects. Articles appear in databases, then students download them, extract information, and cite them. I wanted students to see something different: scholarship as a conversation that changes over time.

By following an idea backward and forward, students begin to see research not simply as finding information, but as encountering knowledge.

For “Biography of an Idea,” I ask students to select a scholarly article that connects to a question they are already exploring. The article does not have to provide the answer to their research question. In fact, it is often more productive if it gives them something to wonder about. I then ask them to choose one idea from the article. It might be:

• A concept the author uses
• A question the author raises
• An argument that surprises the student
• A disagreement between scholars
• A term the student does not fully understand
• A claim that makes the student want to know, “Where did this come from?”

That last question is where the research begins.

The research paper as a conversation

In academic writing, we often tell students that they need to “join the conversation.” I use that particular metaphor frequently, but I realized that students did not always understand what a scholarly conversation actually looks like. This is especially true for students from educational contexts where academic writing was not part of their training. Many of them come to my class and learn about it for the first time. The activity is especially useful for students who are new to academic writing.

“Biography of an Idea” gives them a way to see that conversation in action. Every conversation has a history: Someone says something. Someone else responds. Another person disagrees. Someone takes an earlier idea and applies it somewhere new. Another scholar changes the terminology. Sometimes an idea becomes so familiar that scholars stop citing the person who first introduced it. Sometimes an argument disappears for decades and then returns in a new form.

JSTOR is particularly useful for making this history visible because students can move among scholarly works rather than encountering each article as an isolated document. By following an idea backward and forward, they begin to see research not simply as finding information, but as encountering knowledge: deciding what questions are worth asking, learning the language that makes those questions searchable, figuring out which sources to trust, and making choices about whose ideas become part of their own work.

Assignment at a glance

Course: First-year academic writing.
Student level: First-year undergraduate.
Format: Individual assignment with in-class research and discussion.
Time: Approximately one week (two sessions).
Sources: One starting article and approximately three to five additional scholarly sources traced backward and forward.
Final product: A 250–1500-word “Biography of an Idea” that traces the development of the selected idea and explains how its meaning or use changes across sources.
JSTOR preparation: Students receive a brief introduction to JSTOR’s search, citation, and citation-tracing features before beginning the assignment.
Evaluation: The assignment is evaluated based on the quality of the student’s chosen idea, the relevance and range of sources traced, the accuracy of the research trail, and the student’s ability to explain how the idea develops across the scholarly conversation. For more, see Step 5.

Step 1: Find an idea worth following

Students start with a JSTOR article related to their research interests. For example, say, “Responsibility or Liability? Student Loan Debt and Time Use in College” (Quadlin and Rudel, 2015).

I tell them not to worry about finding the perfect article. At this stage, curiosity matters more than completeness. They read with a slightly different question than they might normally ask of a scholarly source: What in this article makes me want to know more?

In Quadlin and Rudel’s article, a student might become interested in the idea of student debt as either a responsibility that motivates them or a liability that constrains them. The student then writes briefly about why this idea caught their attention. This changes the starting question from What source do I need to fulfill the assignment? to What do I want to understand? Research begins with intellectual curiosity.

Step 2: Follow the idea backward

Once students have identified an idea, they review the article’s citations and references. I ask them to find at least one earlier source that appears to have influenced the idea and use JSTOR to locate and read it to understand the relationship.

For the Quadlin and Rudel example, one can trace the debate over whether educational debt encourages responsible behavior or creates financial constraints.

In this example, students look for two answers:

What did the earlier scholar say? and What did Quadlin and Rudel do with it?

Sometimes the relationship between the ideas above is straightforward, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the chosen scholar revises or complicates the earlier argument. In any case, students begin to see that the citations are more than evidence that a writer did research. They are the evidence of a relationship between ideas.

Step 3: Follow the research forward

After moving backward, students move forward in their research.

Students then use the chosen article’s citation information to locate later scholarship that also engages with the article or idea.

Returning to Quadlin and Rudel, for example, later researchers have taken up the relationship between educational debt, time use, and students’ broader college experience. A student might ask if someone:

• Adopted it?
• Challenged it?
• Renamed it?
• Stopped using it?
• Applied it to another community, historical period, discipline, or problem?
• Discovered a problem with the original argument?

Students begin to see an intellectual genealogy because they can see their idea has predecessors, descendants, disagreements, and adaptations.

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Step 4: Notice what changes

In this stage, I ask students to put the sources next to one another and look for movement rather than summarizing each article.

In the Quadlin and Rudel example, the student might trace the idea this way:

• Earlier scholars debated debt as responsibility or liability.
• Quadlin and Rudel examined those possibilities through students’ patterns of time use.
• Scholars after Quadlin and Rudel extended the conversation by connecting educational debt and time use to other dimensions of students’ experiences.

At this stage of their activity, students begin to realize that scholarly knowledge is not static. It changes as scholars revise questions, terms, arguments, and research context. This is also the moment where I begin to talk about the ethics of research. Some themes of questions I have brought to class include:

• Who gets cited?
• Who gets remembered in the field?
• Whose terminology becomes standard?
• What happens to an argument when later scholars adopt only part of it?
• What knowledge becomes difficult to find because the language used to search for it has changed?

Step 5: Write the biography

The final product of this activity is a short “Biography of an Idea.” Students introduce the idea they selected, explain where they encountered it, and narrate what happened to it as they followed it through scholarship.

For the Quadlin and Rudel, a student might write:

My initial exposure to the idea that student loan debt influences students’ college experiences was through Natasha Yurk Quadlin and Daniel Rudel’s “Responsibility or Liability?” At first, I saw debt mainly as a financial issue. Reviewing their citations helped me see that scholars had already debated whether debt fosters responsibility or creates constraints. Tracing the conversation forward revealed how later researchers expanded these ideas to other areas of students’ lives. I started with a simple question about debt and ended up with a broader understanding of how financial circumstances shape the college experience.

From there, they bring in their sources to explain how and what they trace about the idea.

My rubric for assessing the quality of the assignment asks students to demonstrate six things:

1. A clearly defined idea or question: The student identifies a specific idea, concept, argument, or question and explains why it is worth following.
2. Accurate relationships among sources: The student correctly explains how earlier, central, and later sources relate to one another.
3. Synthesis rather than summary: The student connects sources to show how the idea develops rather than discussing each source separately.
4. Attention to change: The student identifies meaningful changes, disagreements, adaptations, or gaps in the scholarship.
5. Reflection on learning: The student explains what following the idea taught them and how it changed their understanding of their field.
6. Clear and accurate citation: The student appropriately cites the scholarly works they examined and provides enough information for readers to follow the research trail.

The result is still research writing, but students learn to summarize and synthesize sources, trace citations, evaluate evidence, and analyze arguments while also thinking about the production of knowledge itself.

The wildcard

Another reason I bring this activity into my writing classes is that my students are required to assemble a portfolio that includes a wildcard piece. This gives students an opportunity to include writing that does not necessarily fit the more conventional genres they have produced during the semester.

“Biography of an Idea” has become a piece students often submit for the wildcard. Others have created a multimodal version of it using text, images, quotations, citations, audio, video, or other media to show how the idea is inherited, transformed, contested, and reimagined.

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I let them take both approaches because the portfolio also asks writers to reflect not only on what they researched, but on what happened to them as researchers. “Biography of an Idea” allows them to reflect on how following an idea through scholarship changed their understanding of research, their relationship to sources, and sometimes even the question they thought they were trying to answer. In a way, the wildcard visualizes what is difficult to teach directly: research changes the researcher.

What students learn about research

The activity teaches conventional research skills. Those might include searching JSTOR, following citations, identifying relevant scholarship, comparing sources, and synthesizing arguments. However, “Biography of an Idea” also helps students reconsider what those skills mean. They begin to see that a source is not simply “good” because it is scholarly, that a citation is not merely a requirement at the end of a sentence, and that a literature review is more than a list of what other people have said.

A common denominator in all these reactions is that my students begin to see research as a practice of knowledge-making. The above distinction is important to me as a writing instructor. Academic writing courses can easily become courses in academic conventions: where to put the citation, how many sources to use, how to format the bibliography, how to structure the introduction. I am not saying students do not need those conventions. However, those conventions become much more meaningful when students understand the intellectual practices underneath them.

Students begin to search JSTOR to recognize the choices involved in the research before they ever open an article. When students search JSTOR, they decide which terms to use, which results are relevant, which citations to follow, and which arguments deserve attention. Those choices shape the knowledge they ultimately produce as writers. By following an idea through scholarship, students can see how terminology shifts, arguments develop, and disagreements emerge, and how their own writing enters that process.

A small assignment with a larger purpose

I don’t expect every student to leave my academic writing course thinking like a historian, literary scholar, or researcher. They may never write another literature review after they graduate. But I do want them to leave knowing something about how knowledge works.

“Biography of an Idea” is deliberately small. A student can complete it with a handful of sources, and the activity can be adapted to different disciplines, levels of experience, and formats. What matters is not the size of the assignment but the shift in perspective it brings into the conversation. Instead of asking only, What does this source tell me?, my students begin asking: Where did this idea come from?, What happened to it?, Who changed it?, or Whose version survived?, leading them to think, What am I doing to it now?

That last question is perhaps the most important one as a writing instructor, because when students write research papers, they are not simply collecting knowledge that already exists. They are selecting, interpreting, connecting, and presenting knowledge for a new audience. “Biography of an Idea” gives them a way to see that process happening on a small scale before they attempt it in a larger research project. In doing so, it helps them understand not only how to produce academic writing, but how academic knowledge gets produced in the first place.

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